London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: September 2014

What do I really sound like?

Just a random speculation really – do musicians ever really know what it’s like to listen to us? In my case anyway, you hold violin or viola under your chin – the near ends of the resonating strings are rather nearer to my left ear than my ears are to each other, and there are extra vibrations running though my jawbone to my skull and inner ear without passing through the air at all (albeit in my case somewhat damped by the beard!). So what I hear when playing is certainly not what anyone in an audience hears. ‘Raw’ demo recordings tend to be quite unkind to bowed strings, because of webcam mikes optimised to human speech for one thing, so usually before I release anything I do a treble cut and also noise reduction for the obvious reason! I think these make it a better representation of my playing, but the truth is it most obviously simply makes it sound nicer; it would be very hard for me to tell (and perhaps irrelevant to my purposes) if that light manipulation was actually covering up defects in tone and sound. (I was thinking about this listening back to some demos that had been sent to me, I had overdubbed and then comments had been sent back, making me return to a very unpolished product to follow the responses.) Studio recordings have much more accurate recording systems to start with, but also much more sophisticated sound manipulation systems which are normally used with the goal of the best sound possible, not necessarily the sound most like what could have been heard in the studio during the sessions.

In some ways amplified musicians have it easier – you can get a long lead and stand 20 feet away from your amp while playing and that is a pretty good idea of what the audience would hear. In theory of course you can do it during a gig and find out what they actually hear, though you’ll probably be too busy soloing without tripping over the audience to pay much attention … But acoustic instruments, except if the other sounds around are massively loud, are heard directly even when played amplified, so you still wouldn’t get a comparable impression. (It’s quite rare for the amount of noise on stage to be so loud that I really need monitors to hear myself. This is quite useful given how many gigs I play with amplification but bad or no foldback!)

It’s a bit of a tree falling in the forest with no-one to hear question, but it does reveal that there’s an assumption underlying all the self-promotion all musicians have to do, which is that we sound roughly how we think we do – close enough to it to be worth listening to, close enough that people who hear us won’t say ‘never again’. And in the world of endless statistics and Big Data, the era of prizing scientific evidence above all other means of knowing, that is something it seems we all ultimately have to take on trust.

Realmusik

Another Prom-inspired post today; this time, from Daniel Barenboim and his East-West Divan Orchestra’s version of Ravel’s Bolero. Remarkable I think for demonstrating both social and musical awareness of reality even if opposed to tradition.

The non-musical side first: I think the first conventional ‘classical’ Prom I have seen where colour was allowed onstage other than for soloists. The men, in fact, were in suit and tie rather than white tie or all black (black tie seems to be the amateur uniform in general), perhaps acknowledging that in practice hardly anyone wears evening dress of whatever monochromicity on any regular basis.

Then as to the performance: a few introductory notes might be required here for some people (skip them if you know the piece). Bolero is based around a single snare drum pattern that goes on for its whole quarter-hour duration, over which is placed basically a single tune, one variation on it and innumerable different orchestrations and accompaniments, and then a very brief coda at the end. There are no changes of speed or rhythmic pattern. I could write about the historical and stylistic significance of that but it’s not really important here. It was written I think about 1920, I can’t be bothered looking up the exact date, do it yourself if you want to.

Now the main role in performance of your typical orchestral conductor (choral conducting is usually a little different) is to act as a silent human metronome, giving the pulse in standard patterns of arm-waving. What they do in all the preparation phases is another matter, and most conductors indicate a lot more than the beat as well, but that is the basis. Barenboim, on this occasion, probably only did that for about a quarter of the piece in total. If your snare drummer is good, then why bother duplicating? Better to avoid potential discrepancies and just get the orchestra to follow his (it was a man on this occasion) pulse instead. Barenboim did fully conduct some sections, particularly the ending when there must be about a hundred musicians playing all at once, did do a certain amount of indicating mood, volume etc., and did cue a lot of the more important entries (there are some very very long rests in Bolero!). But nonetheless he spent a fair amount of time just waiting for the next point where his involvement might actually add something, at least security. At one point the live director decided to cut to him, showing him leaning against the rail around the podium and with his arms folded. Hardly the image of artistic reverence usually expected of renowned conductors!

As well as being deliberately recruited from across the Arab-Jewish divide in the Middle East, the East-West Divan Orchestra are a fairly young ensemble by classical pro standards. This may be involved with the more relaxed dress code, at least one visibly heavily pregnant wind player and openness to musical experiment. Which brings me on to jazz and Ravel.

Ravel definitely listened to early jazz as well as its ragtime and other precursors, though whether through bands travelling to Europe, the early recordings that were made in the US from 1917 and gradually became available across the Atlantic or both I don’t know. For my grade 8 exam, I played the middle movement of his Violin Sonata, subtitled ‘Blues’ and involving a lot of suitably crunchy major-minor chords, slides and banjo-style strumming (which I once practised for so long in an effort to nail down the rapid alternate-picking rhythm patterns that I got a blister on my finger. No picks for violinists sadly); it sounds a lot more like a trad jazz number with ‘blues’ in the title than what we would probably think of as early blues, but the influence is unmistakeable.

Bolero has some decided jazz influences in some of the harmonies, melodic shaping and chromaticism. But it’s often not taken much notice of by performances usually more interested in Spanish influences or proto-minimalism. The orchestra involved is huge, but there are some parts which can be missed out or transferred to other instruments; this is often done with the (apparently) three saxophone parts. Barenboim opted to include two of them, soprano and tenor, which isn’t bad out of three; and perhaps in line with that, relevant players notably in the reed and brass sections had clearly been instructed – or at the least permitted – to play up the inter-war jazz potential of their solos. The principal trombonist was certainly hamming it up to heaven with thoroughly undignified slides and vibrato (hardly ever used by orchestral brass nowadays); and the soprano sax player’s blue notes and glides from one note to another drew a wonderful grin from the principal bassoon sitting next to him at just the same time that my face did something similar. There’s also a long chunk of writing where the strings pluck chords in rhythmic patterns rather like a harp or even a minimal guitar part; where normally the only acceptable mode of pizzicato playing is with the instrument in the position used for bowing and the first finger, the East-West Divan violins and violas were certainly holding their instruments across their knees like undersized banjos, though I didn’t get enough close-ups to see if they were using their thumbs as the position would suggest.

All of which, in my view, constitutes a look at what is actually there in the music, with accretions of tradition largely about orchestral music performance in general stripped off. It’s a process classical music has been going through in a lot of areas in the last generation or so, discovering in the process that a lot of the music it plays (basically anything written before about 1900, possibly even later) wasn’t actually conceived with the sort of interpretation and context it now gets, or used to get in the first half of the twentieth century, in mind. Never mind applauding between movements, Beethoven’s symphonies were premiered with whole other pieces played in between the sections. Mozart probably expected keyboard continuo throughout, even though there’s no figured bass in most of his scores; Haydn and Beethoven certainly both conducted from the keyboard. Even as late as Wagner or Brahms, orchestras would not have been using continuous vibrato (which I was trained to do around the millennium!) or synchronising their bowing.

Perhaps, if the burden of questionable tradition were less universal upon the people that interpret earlier people’s music – in any genre – there might be less worry about curious details of performance and more focus on the material in hand; and we, the audiences, might find that material more striking and less uniform and unchallenging than we had thought.

Memory (without AL-W)

Lately, besides furiously, desperately and mostly frustratedly househunting and trying to ruffle as few feathers as possible staying in a communal house with a wide variety of people (including two under-sixes), I’ve been doing a lot of work without sheet music, or aiming towards not using notes. This might be because I intend to be filmed doing it, for the showreel which is starting to come together; or because there never has been anything written down, in the case of material from bands I may be joining / forming where I’ve got demo recordings and if I’m lucky a list of chords; or it might be because I expect or hope to be gigging the relevant stuff within the foreseeable future in contexts where music stands are usually considered unprofessional (or just uncool).

And frankly, it’s making my head hurt. At least two days this week I have literally hit the apparent end of my ability to memorise stuff (mostly Irish ballads and drinking songs) and had to stop because I wasn’t actually taking in any more tunes. It’s demoralising.

There’s a story that writing was opposed by at least some classical philosophers, on the grounds that once people could as it were store knowledge outside themselves, they would no longer bother to remember and would become lazy and foolish. Perhaps all the more so when you can call up more or less any information at any time with your smartphone? It is noticeable that the people with repertoires of two, three, five hundred songs, all of which they can genuinely perform on request without going away and revising them, are in traditions where at most you might write down chords and lyrics, but generally you learn by ear and play by heart, and certainly you never have in front of a complete transcription that lets you play something without remembering any of it.

Then again, it’s still normal (though not as universal as it used to be) for classical concerto soloists to play without music. Opera singers, of course, don’t hold scores onstage. And one of the legendary English conductors of the early twentieth century – possibly Beecham – always used to conduct without a score, which implies memorising all the relevant aspects of pieces of music up to an hour long with hardly any repetition of material completely unchanged and perhaps as many as thirty different parts.

Well either way I don’t know how they do it. I have noticed the odd thing that something I’ve struggled with one day, I may actually be able to play – without first looking back at the dots – and with a better sense of the shape of it rather than just a succession of phrases the following day. So maybe there’s hope for those Irish pub gigs yet.

Demonstrations

Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos must be the most accomplished demo EP ever. This set of 6 concerti grossi (so scored for a then-normal strings-and-continuo orchestra plus a group of at least three soloists, who are employed more like a second, smaller ensemble) are each, it is pretty universally acknowledged, unique not only from the rest of Baroque music but also from each other, a staggering achievement. They were written to accompany Bach’s application to a chief musician post – which would have involved composing to request (mostly probably for the royal chapel or state occasions), but also and probably more importantly acting as day-to-day director of music at court (secular and religious), running the musical establishment and being main organist. Bach didn’t get the job (!), and we only have the scores to the Brandenburgs because the German minor princes he was applying to didn’t have a good clear-out between when they received them (and probably never even had them played) and when Bach became fashionable for really the first time (he was thought rather old-fashioned in his own time) about 100 years after his death. If he kept copies himself they were lost.

As my hard drive starts to fill up with not just solo demo recordings, but home overdubs showing what I could do with/on other people’s material – tailored collaboration / band demos if you will, the no-travel-costs postmodern equivalent of being asked to audition on a band’s core repertoire – I’m starting to know how Bach might have felt. And in the early 18th century printing music was a relatively very expensive and elaborate and fairly rare process – quite a lot of performers played largely music written in-house, as it were, rather than buying items out of catalogues or renting them from libraries. There had to be a large guaranteed market to make it profitable, and it wasn’t assumed to be a core part of a musician/composer’s work.

The 60s folkie title character in Inside Llewyn Davies says to his sister, ‘You don’t put your rehearsals out in public.’ And a lot of people have historically been keen to restrict what’s actually being sold with their name on it to what was produced for that intent, avoiding publishing technically lower-quality and possibly musically inferior ‘demos’ which were only intended to secure investment from music industry companies. But that was when publication of all kinds was owned by corporate entities and reserved almost exclusively for highly polished professional product.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and music can be distributed for free if that’s what you want to do, either as sheet music or recordings. And information overload has produced a substantial ‘more is more’ attitude, particularly to getting noticed. If I don’t blog for a few days (or strictly speaking if my website remains static for a few days), it starts to fall down Google rankings. Facebook, which I remember in the early days without a news feed (!), now pretty much bases its activity around feeds and timelines – which means you’re shown everything starting with the most recent; only what’s new is really visible.

So there’s a case to be made for trickling stuff out, even if in dribs and drabs, in order to stay in the public eye (however small your public – and also if seeking to expand it!). And maybe if you’re using it to build up attention towards something bigger, there might be a case that it doesn’t matter if it’s rough and unfinished – people will listen to it once if that, so it’s hardly likely to destroy your reputation. Webcam footage of rehearsals is increasingly common band teaser material.

But I don’t think I’m quite ready to run the risks of putting other people’s demos, with my overdubs, out in the public domain. It raises all sorts of questions about ownership and control that aren’t really settled for the internet / citizen publishing era yet. So maybe those collaboration demos should stay in my hard drive, whatever else I release. After all, I don’t think they’re quite the Brandenburg concertos.

Interesting times

So this is shaping up to be at the least a busy and interesting month. So far tryout practices or similar with an understated alt-folk act from Surrey, a steampunk / goth / dark cabaret bunch starting up in Watford and a roots/Americana band from North London (possibly a tryout gig with them as well!); plus playing fiddle for an Irish gig on Sunday in Ruislip, starting work on a video showreel on Friday and lots and lots of other things I’ve sent off messages about that probably won’t go anywhere. Oh, and of course there is still the matter of finding somewhere permanent to live, preferably before my fortnight at the current place expires!

Just one thought: there really ought to be airmiles for trains (railmiles I suppose). And coaches, or preferably both. Either that or the invention of teleportation is overdue.